Too Cold to Go Walking

Sat inside today recovering from sore feet from the several days of walking the highways and by-ways of Manhattan. The sky is steely gray yesterday and there is light rain that came down on Saturday morning. We walked so far on Wednesday that our feet started to hurt. And then we added insult to injury on Thursday with more walking as we rushed through the streets of the Lower East Side, Chinatown and Canal Street.

What a mob! At 3:00 in the afternoon the sidewalks of Canal Street are crawling with people. New York is not an unfamiliar place to the Hi-Tech-And-Antique eBay Store. But so much has changed. The streets and alleyways are still the same, but the buildings and the businesses are all different and on Canal the place has turned into a mob scene with everyone looking for bargains by the hundreds without even room to walk, since much of the merchandise is piled up on the sidewalk. People jostle each other in the crowded confines, and each corner is a struggle to get through with all the crowds. We also walked up and down the streets of Chinatown, looking for familiar sights. A hole-in-the-wall restaurant that was favored by many relatives is gone and has been replaced by a purely vegetarian hole-in-the-wall place called "House of Vegetable". Thinking back to the old place, we remembered the admonishment from decades ago:  "The food is delicious, but don't tell anyone else about Jimmy's". Jimmy was the name of the owner, no one else could pronounce the Chinese name of the place. Of course, as we found out later in life, that is the same warning that was issued by every other family who went to every other restaurant in Chinatown. "Don't tell a soul, it'll be overrun." Since then we have heard that same phrase over and over applied to a variety of Chinese restaurants there, some with good food and some with truly mediocre food.

So we took a photo of the old restaurant for old times sake, but the place is not as exotic or mysterious as we remember it nor is the neighborhood. Instead we broke with tradition and boldly went down the street a couple of doors and ordered some delicious duck soup with wontons and noodles in a restaurant that specialized in wonton soup. Page after page of soups and wontons of all kinds. We knew from previous research that one of the dialect names for wontons is "swallowing clouds" because of their shape - like clouds floating in the sky (soup). So we had a delicious repast of a huge bowl of clouds which we swallowed down with greedy gusto, leaving a pile of duck bones on the side of the plate. Some things never change, and we were reassured that good food, while it may may not be in the same place, can still be found in the neighborhood. Just don't tell anyone, the place will be overrun with tourists.